Multiplication of two numbers is easy, right? At primary school we learn how to do long multiplication like this: Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians ...

People tend to obsess over making computer software faster. You can, of course, just crank up the clock speed and add more processors, but often the most powerful way to make something faster is to ...

This summer, battle lines were drawn over a simple math problem: 8 ÷ 2(2 + 2) = ? If you divide 8 by 2 first, you get 16, but if you multiply 2 by (2 + 2) first, you get 1. So, which answer is right?

Most people know just one way to multiply two large numbers by hand. Typically, they learned it in elementary school. They’re often surprised to find that there are a variety of ways to do ...

Methods similar to this go back thousands of years, at least to the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians. Around 1956, the famous Soviet mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov conjectured that this is the best ...